


a place to land

by cornflakesortoast



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Compliant, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Mentioned Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Trauma, ghostbur and philza will come in later i swear, lots of the tommy/techno dyanmic for the soul, no beta we die like men, recovery arc, set after tommy escapes to technoblade's cabin
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:13:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29138358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cornflakesortoast/pseuds/cornflakesortoast
Summary: set right after the exile arc; snippets of tommy's time with techno, with a focus on tommy recovering//It had been a long time since he trusted his brother, and an even longer one since their family had lived under the same roof, before everything splintered between them. He doesn’t blame them for leaving. The shattering had been happening for a long time now. If he tries, he can trace the cracks back through the years. There’s not a certain start to them, just intricate breaks that begin one day and don’t stop adding up until suddenly it's too late to fix them. The evidence is there, he’s not denying it, because the cracks that his father and his brothers create are where Tommy grows his roots.So he secrets himself away.Technoblade finds him, because of course he does.
Relationships: Clay | Dream & Technoblade & TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF), No Romantic Relationships - Relationship, SBI - Relationship, Technoblade & TommyInnit & Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Technoblade & TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 44





	a place to land

**Author's Note:**

> set right after the exile arc; snippets of tommy's time with techno, with a focus on tommy recovering

**december fifteenth**  
(inside dnret)  
_2:02am_

Tommy has seen Dream and Wilbur and Techno and Schlatt, watched them learn how to wield the world like a weapon around their fingertips. Tommy has learned that loneliness is dark, and that it’s all his mind can do to fill in the left-behind silence with enough noise to convince him he’s solid instead of smoke. 

The noise in his head tells him to focus on Dream. The idea of him promises to teach him everything he’s rarely known, and so he scrambles for purchase at his side. He desperately aches to find acceptance, exiled and alone, omitting Ghostbur. He’s danced that delicate waltz between the two of them, something bittersweet and not quite friends. Or brothers. Because Ghostbur is not quite Wilbur. And so his words fail on his lips and Dream becomes the idea and shines untouchable just out of reach, until the rest of the world has fallen away and all Tommy can do is scramble for a hold.

Now, the verbal branding that Dream left on him doesn’t go away, not even as Tommy picks through the rubble that is Logstedshire, or when he up and leaves it, trudging his ragged silhouette through snow for miles. It especially doesn’t go away when he stumbles into warmth hours later, snowdrifts clinging to his boots, already going through the motions of deluding himself that this cabin was a safe haven. 

But he wouldn’t wait for Techno to find him. It had been a long time since he trusted his brother, and an even longer one since their family had lived under the same roof, before everything splintered between them. He doesn’t blame them for leaving. The shattering had been happening for a long time now. If he tries, he can trace the cracks back through the years. There’s not a certain start to them, just intricate breaks that begin one day and don’t stop adding up until suddenly it's too late to fix them. The evidence is there, he’s not denying it, because the cracks that his father and his brothers create are where Tommy grows his roots.

So he secrets himself away. 

He lowers himself into the room with fingers chilled into clumsy numbness, the cotton-candy pull of golden apples lingering on his tongue, the hum of potions still singing in his blood, akin to hot venom in his veins. 

It’s hardly a room, really. It’s a hole, a hasty, rough-hewn thing. Just the sort that he belonged in, where no one could see him or hear him. It only ends up marginally warmer than the outside, though at the very least it’s out of the wind. 

The ache comes back to him slowly, as he shivers himself into something like sleep. His body still felt the burn from the day’s events; of explosions, clothes singed from standing too close, of the cold. It seeps into his toes and spreads painfully throughout his burned legs, and his exposed foot, which felt dangerously close to frostbitten. He should get up and tend to himself, he knows. But fear of Dream, every word he’d said that left him cold and brutal and icy inside Tommy’s spine, and the dread of Techno finding him—both antipathies had run ridges into his veins, but he’d been walking for so long, and he’s just so _tired..._

**december sixteenth**  
(techno’s cabin)  
_1:58pm_

Tommy flops down on the bed across from Techno and kicks his bare feet right above the floor. It’s just the two of them, alone in Techno’s cabin. No furious estranged best friends, no omnipresent smiling masked tyrant. Techno had found him, of course, not even a day later, holed up down in Dnret. Now they’re sharing the guest room, matching twin beds on opposite ends of the room, because somehow sleeping in separate rooms made them both feel too small in the big and empty house. They’d formed a shaky alliance over secret vaults and wither skulls, new armor and cat discs.

Under any other circumstances, Tommy would have peacocked in his own valor. He’d managed to scrounge himself up a position where he has access to all of a homicidal anarchist’s things, for Ender’s sake. But a heavy weight dragged him down, heavier than he had felt when he was still pining over a presidency months ago. Incoherent rambling had somehow secured his place in Techno’s home; about his exile, about how he’d wound up underneath the cabin in the first place, about the discs. Technoblade had agreed, though not without making some stupid speech about how terrible they had treated him, and how Tubbo was corrupted. 

Tommy had only looked up at him miserably, eyes baleful as he explained himself. It sounded only halfway sincere, but this was more warmth and affection than Tommy’s been shown in months, and as fate would have it, they fell on the same side of this moral abyss. That, at the very least, meant something to him.

His legs are longer than they were last year and almost touch the floorboards, his toes barely scraping the ground with each swing. The room is still haphazardly unpacked, golden apples and ender pearls and half-empty potions and everything Tommy had stolen from the chests strewn across the dresser, and not quite yet lived in. There are still spiderwebs to clean from the corners and stories to tell to age the wood, but it’s home for the indefinite future and they have plenty of time to do both.

“Just so you know,” Tommy says to the ceiling. He can hear Techno unclasp his cape from across the room, shrug out of it. “I still hate you.” 

It isn’t true, not anymore, but the lie comes easy, despite the way his insides are turning inside out. He thinks he’s doing a pretty good job of pretending, anyways, at least until Techno sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed, blinking over at him. 

Tommy’s eyes traitorously jump to meet Techno’s, and he can only hope his panic doesn’t look as evident as it feels. Techno resumed a more or less frigid composure—a neutral expression making his icy eyes a bit more tactless than they already were, presenting a wall of watered down annoyance instead of friendliness. Tommy could only watch unhappily as Techno’s gaze shifted, catching the lilt of uncertainty in his voice, and probably laying too much significance in the stumbling of the tongue.

“Tommy,” Techno starts, slowly, monotone.

Techno pauses again, and Tommy hates it. Ordinarily he would have found his set, unspeaking jaw a relief from his usual diatribe. Instead it leaves him wondering if the part of him that’s still clinging to the hate-facet of this complex relationship with the guy next to him even means it. His toes curl up as he begs _don’t call me on it, don’t call me on it, don’t call me on it,_ in his head, as if thinking it loud enough will make Technoblade catch on, so he doesn’t have to crumble and admit the truth. So he doesn’t have to admit just how badly he wants more than what Techno is willing to give—the brotherhood they used to have.

So Tommy returns his silence with more silence, studying their surroundings as objectively as he could, in hopes that he would get the point and leave him alone. It was just when Tommy started to get dizzy—there’s only so much drywall you can stare at while you’re trying your best to pretend like it isn’t tripping off your tendency towards semi-claustrophobia—that Techno seemed to get the figurative message. He couldn’t see him out of his peripheral, but he could hear his feet scrape the floor and the soft click of the door shutting.

Somehow the resounding silence in the empty room was louder than anything Techno could’ve said.

**december seventeenth**  
(trail to l’manburg)  
_2:24pm_

It’s not a particularly long way, but every time it feels shorter. Maybe because the route is more familiar every time they follow it. Maybe because time seems to be pressing down, limited now that there’s a definitive end to everything. For the first time in months, Tommy doesn’t know if he’ll be back again. He’s exiled, and living with Technoblade. Neither of them know what that means for the long-term.

Not so very long ago, Tommy had walked this path with a spring in his step and a song in his heart. Now, he felt as grey and indistinct inside as the foggy woodland around him. The duo had set out to perform their minor act of terrorism for the day—which came, absurdly, in the form of dogs. He’d thought nothing of it when Techno had dragged him down in tow to tame Max, but when Tommy stumbled down underneath L’manburg after Techno, greeted by a great chorus of barks, he was bewildered. 

His brother had the grace to helpfully supply him with a two-word explanation: Hound Army. 

Now, his mind isn’t occupied with bemusedly training or breeding dogs. It drifts to the topic that threatens the borders of his mind; L’manburg. Because he hadn’t been back before. Not since his Exile. Not since today. He’d thought about it a lot, sure, but it was different than actually seeing it. He doesn’t know how that makes him feel, but it suits him fine enough to call it anger. 

So he resorts to raging down the gully, kicking up clumps of moss and loosely embedded rocks as he went. Techno’s presence seemed to have escaped his notice as the two of them walked. He was not yet throwing a tantrum—no, that would require a lot more yelling and stomping about—but he was certainly close. All he needed was the right incentive to let loose, to set everything around him ablaze. 

He had come upon the decision, after they had fled L’manburg, that he loathed Technoblade. He hated pretty much everyone, actually, but the pink asshole held a special place in his hateful heart. L’manburg had been built up again since he had been exiled—built up, because Techno destroyed it. New L’manburg had only reminded him of his ball of spite. Of course.

It was not until he stationed himself at the edge of a small streamlet and took a long moment to steady his proverbial course that Tommy was once again reminded that he had an audience. Suddenly his fingers itch to do something, so he summons a gapple up from his inventory (he’d plucked it nonchalantly from a chest that morning, under Techno’s disappointed gaze), something to do, anything. 

Technoblade raised an eyebrow at him.

“Show’s over,” he mumbled, face angled away from Techno, and he keeps walking.

**december eighteenth**  
(outside techno’s cabin)  
_6:37pm_

Techno is away, and Tommy goes out and builds a cobblestone tower. 

Silhouetted dark against the umber sky, was the tower. It was a stilted, tremendous, ugly thing. Not like the Intimidation Tower, tall and tapered and meant to bar people out, with pink stripes to match, or like the one he’d built after Dream left, in a haze of desperation that ended in a state of manic comprehension, nothing more than a shack on its foundations. This one was entirely Tommy’s own, as if he had woven the very fiber of his own being into the cobbles themselves. 

The monolithic black pillar rose into the sky, jutting from the ground like a black beacon against the stars, girded in slush and grass. And above that, trailing footholds of massive carven stone vanishing upwards into whirling snow, tossed by arctic wind. A wind that hummed in Tommy’s hair as he built, that whistled through the crags in the stone and picked up higher as he climbed up. 

Up, galloping up past the clouds, above the cloud cover. Techno didn’t want the tower here, he knew that, but that only increased the thrill of it all.

He pauses to throw out a foot to kick at a spider, before continuing his ascent upwards. It was methodical, the rhythmic placing upwards, the stones rough over his hands. He doesn’t stop until he runs out of blocks.

From the peak of ruined stone he stood upon, Tommy crouched low over the snow-choked architecture. As he comes to a stop at the top of the tower, rocking his weight to the side, Tommy plants his feet on either side of the rocky outcrop and throws his hands out on either side of him, and screams.

Screams, because Dream and Technoblade and _Tubbo_ can’t reach him all the way up here. Screams, because his mind is cacophony but he’s rarely known silence. He’s rarely known slotting against another person and fitting like he was meant to be there. He’s rarely known the light of acceptance and the stability from being just like them. Every time he does, it gives him just enough hope to keep trying. It’s never enough, and it will never be enough. All he knows is feeling other and lesser and freak and asshole and loser.

So he lets go. He lets his mouth fall open, the scream clawing its way up and out through his throat, a scream of hysteria and grief and terror and all of the feelings he had pent up since the Revolution, but the lilt of a smile curdles into Tommy’s yell. When he shuts his eyes, he doesn’t see white and red or blue, great bursts of color within his tightly shut eyelids. He doesn’t hear the ringing in his ears after an explosion or the shrieking whistle of fireworks or the echo of Wilbur’s voice, _Tommy, let’s be the bad guys._ So it bubbles into laughter before it tapers off into the night. It leaves him breathless, his throat raw and scratchy, but the catharsis and exhilaration of it all still simmers within him.

Techno is away, and Tommy goes out and builds a cobblestone tower.

**Author's Note:**

> thIS IS MY FIRST FIC UH


End file.
